Petitions to watch | Conference of March 16, 2012

Posted Fri, March 2nd, 2012 12:45 pm by Matthew Bush

At its March 16, 2012 Conference, the Court will consider such issues as the First Amendment and sexual abuse in churches, a city’s standing to sue its parent state, whether a dog sniff can establish probable cause, the free speech of religious student groups, and a death row inmate’s ability to stay habeas proceedings. This edition of “Petitions to watch” features petitions raising issues that Tom has determined to have a reasonable chance of being granted, although we post them here without consideration of whether they present appropriate vehicles in which to decide those issues. The full list of our “Petitions to watch” for the March 2 and March 16 Conferences can be found here. Any cases that are relisted following the March 2 Conference will be added to this list once that information is available.

City of Hugo, Oklahoma v. Buchannan

Docket: 11-852Issue(s): Whether a political subdivision has standing, in a suit against its parent state, to press (i) exclusively statutory claims; (ii) exclusively “structural” claims (constitutional or statutory); or (iii) no claim at all, so that petitioners may challenge (or not) a state law on the ground that it exceeds the state’s power under the dormant Commerce Clause.

John Doe AP v. Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis

Docket: 11-840Issue(s): Whether the First Amendment shields religious
organizations from accountability for negligence and
negligent supervision and retention of their employees
who sexually abuse children.

Alpha Delta Chi-Delta Chapter v. Reed

Docket: 11-744Issue(s): (1) Whether a university violates the free speech and free association rights of religious student organizations by denying them access to a speech forum because they require their members and leaders to agree with the groups’ religious beliefs, while at the same time granting access to nonreligious groups that require their members and leaders to agree with the groups’ nonreligious beliefs; and (2) whether a university violates the Free Exercise Clause by expressly targeting religious student groups for exclusion from a student organization speech forum and by burdening their religious practice pursuant to a policy that is neither neutral nor generally applicable.

Certiorari stage documents:

Ramirez-Villalpando v. Holder

Docket: 11-415Issue(s): Whether an abstract of judgment, which is prepared
by a court clerk for sentencing purposes after a defendant’s
guilty plea and without the defendant’s input, qualifies as
a conclusive record made or used in adjudicating guilt
that may be relied upon to determine whether a prior
conviction qualifi es as an aggravated felony under Shepard v. United States (2005).

Certiorari stage documents:

Segal v. United States

Docket: 11-343Issue(s): (1) Whether the intent to defraud, under the mail and wire fraud statutes, requires an intent to cause harm; (2) whether mail and wire fraud may be premised on misstatements to parties other than the alleged victims of the fraud, without evidence that the victims knew of the misstatements or would have found them material; and (3) whether the breach of a fiduciary or legal duty imposed by state law can form the basis for a federal mail or wire fraud prosecution.

Certiorari stage documents:

Docket: 10-930Issue(s): Does 18 U.S.C. § 3599(a)(2), “which provides that an indigent capital state inmate pursuing federal habeas relief "shall be entitled to the appointment of one or more attorneys," entitle a death row inmate to stay the federal habeas proceedings he initiated if he is not competent to assist counsel?

Merits Case Pages and Archives

The court issued additional orders from the December 2 conference on Monday. The court did not grant any new cases or call for the views of the solicitor general in any cases. On Tuesday, the court released its opinions in three cases. The court also heard oral arguments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The calendar for the December sitting is available on the court's website. On Friday the justices met for their December 9 conference; Honeycutt v. United States.

Major Cases

Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.(1) Whether courts should extend deference to an unpublished agency letter that, among other things, does not carry the force of law and was adopted in the context of the very dispute in which deference is sought; and (2) whether, with or without deference to the agency, the Department of Education's specific interpretation of Title IX and 34 C.F.R. § 106.33, which provides that a funding recipient providing sex-separated facilities must “generally treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity,” should be given effect.

Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami(1) Whether, by limiting suit to “aggrieved person[s],” Congress required that a Fair Housing Act plaintiff plead more than just Article III injury-in-fact; and (2) whether proximate cause requires more than just the possibility that a defendant could have foreseen that the remote plaintiff might ultimately lose money through some theoretical chain of contingencies.

Moore v. Texas(1) Whether it violates the Eighth Amendment and this Court’s decisions in Hall v. Florida and Atkins v. Virginia to prohibit the use of current medical standards on intellectual disability, and require the use of outdated medical standards, in determining whether an individual may be executed.

Pena-Rodriguez v. ColoradoWhether a no-impeachment rule constitutionally may bar evidence of racial bias offered to prove a violation of the Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury.

Conference of December 9, 2016

FTS USA, LLC v. Monroe (1) Whether the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Due Process Clause permit a collective action to be certified and tried to verdict based on testimony from a small subset of the putative plaintiffs, without either any statistical or other similarly reliable showing that the experiences of those who testified are typical and can reliably be extrapolated to the entire class, or a jury finding that the testifying witnesses are representative of the absent plaintiffs; and (2) whether the procedure for determining damages upheld by the Sixth Circuit, in which the district court unilaterally determined damages without any jury finding, violates the Seventh Amendment.

Overton v. United States Whether, consistent with this Court's Brady v. Maryland jurisprudence, a court may require a defendant to demonstrate that suppressed evidence “would have led the jury to doubt virtually everything” about the government's case in order to establish that the evidence is material.

Turner v. United States (1) Whether, under Brady v. Maryland, courts may consider information that arises after trial in determining the materiality of suppressed evidence; and (2) whether, in a case where no physical evidence inculpated petitioners, the prosecution's suppression of information that included the identification of a plausible alternative perpetrator violated petitioners' due process rights under Brady.